Oecotheology: Natural Wisdom in Old English Poetry

OEcotheology: Natural Wisdom in Old English Poetry

Courtney Barajas, Whitworth University

January 10, 2019 at 2:30 PM in Buchanan Tower (1873 E Mall), room 323

Apocalyptic anxieties at the turn of the millennium, fueled by the Christian tendency to interpret patterns of the natural world as signs of divine will, led to a surge of “green thinking” in early medieval England. Reading the Old English wisdom poems Maxims I and The Order of the World as representative examples of the genre, Barajas argues that vernacular poetry at the turn of the millennium sometimes figured the created world as a coherent (if not always cooperative) entity: a divine ecosystem.